8/31/06: Blackboard Jungle (1955)

[This item was written hours before the first reports of Glenn Ford’s death. We’ve left the piece untouched, but wanted to add our admiration of Ford as an actor. Check out 1963’s Love Is A Ball for a great performance that won’t be mentioned in the obituaries.]  

“Thank God,” says the readership, “we thought it was going to be another movie full of cheerleaders taking off their clothes and engaging in wild sex.” Instead, we’re mining an earlier brand of exploitation, with a timeless classroom drama that remains a strange curio.

Blackboard Jungle is supposed to star Glenn Ford as an idealistic teacher struggling to reach troubled inner-city youth. Our hero is certainly striking enough. But while this gritty classic is fun to watch, our changing culture hasn’t done much for Ford’s character. Today, Blackboard Jungle is more about good intentions turned into lousy policy.

First-year teacher Richard Dadier (Ford) certainly has reason to make some changes. He’s stuck in a school full of hateful students and a resigned faculty. He also becomes the target of juvenile delinquent Artie West—who, as portrayed by Vic Morrow, looks to be attending high school on the G.I. Bill.

Sadly, Dadier—or, as West calls him, “Daddy-O”—ends up as part of the problem. There’s a particularly lousy scene where Dadier reaches out to his illiterate charges by showing them a cartoon. That’s not challenging anyone to reach their true potential. That’s making life hard for any poor kid in that class who can read.

It’s especially irritating since the scene is portrayed as a triumph. The cartoon feels more like a betrayal of milquetoast fellow teacher Richard Kiley, who’s fled the school after West and his gang broke all of their instructor's beloved jazz LP’s. (The kids in this high school, of course, are Bill Haley fans.)

You can’t say that Blackboard Jungle is dated, though. Dadier tries to teach the kids about tolerance by using a racial slur. West uses that un-p.c. moment as an excuse to get Ford hauled before the school principal. The brouhaha also endangers Dadier’s relationship with a potential good kid played by Sidney Poitier—although the resulting confrontation now resembles a classically lame liberal exercise. (SPOILER: The white guy is inherently racist.)

So why is Blackboard Jungle celebrated here? It’s not because of the prologue that blames troubled youth on the breakdown of the American family after World War II. Personally, we think stopping Hitler was worth giving bad parents a quick excuse.

We mainly love this film because of a kid named Santini. Don’t ask us how he got that name, because he doesn’t look Italian. He’s played by an actor who looks more like a mideastern immigrant. Santini spends most of the film in the background. But when things get tense at the end of the film, and West looks ready to use a switchblade on Daddy-O…

        ANOTHER 51-YEAR-OLD SPOILER WARNING

…Santini comes running to spear West in the gut with an American flag.

Even better, Santini is played by a young actor named Jameel Farah. Imagine our best Paul Harvey impersonation as we proudly note that Blackboard Jungle’s true hero would become M*A*S*H regular and Gong Show judge Jamie Farr. That’s our idea of an American dream born of inner-city schools. The only thing missing is Farah’s rallying cry of “Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!”

Make it your own: We can’t recommend Blackboard Jungle as part of the “Controversial Classics Collection,” since it includes a few Leftist films that don’t feature Jamie Farr. He shows up for the commentary on the reasonably priced individual DVD, though. You also get a Droopy cartoon.

 

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